Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/290

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274
THE CALL FOR HELP

board.… Get me south of Boston again—hurry—use—power dying—hurry.

That was the end of the message.

"But the Princeton!" gasped the woman. "If you can't get the Princeton!"

"Wait—wait—I'm getting her," answered the man, bent low over his responder, as though the sense it appealed to were vision and not sight. "They've been waiting for me to relay. They've been——"

He left the speech unended, for he was busy sending his spark cannonading across its gap.

He kept up that cannonading until it seemed to the watching woman that it was never going to end. Then he switched off and listened again, and again cannonaded his answer.

Then he dropped wearily into his chair, wiped he was not alone. He looked up at the woman with a strangely transfiguring smile on his sweat-stained face.

"It's over," he said, with the simplicity of utter weariness.

"You've got them—the Princeton?" she asked.

"I've got them!"

She put out her two Hands to him. It was meant as an impersonal gesture of gratitude, and he knew it as he took them in his. But there seemed something revivifying and electrical in